I felt as if I had suddenly come alive for the first time — as if I were awakening from a long deep sleep into the real world … . I realized that I was surrounded by an incredible loving energy, and that everything, both living and non-living, is bound inextricably with a kind of consciousness which I cannot describe in words.
Here is an account by an American authoress, Claire Myers Owen:
One morning I was writing at my desk in the quiet writing room of our house in Connecticut. Suddenly everything within my sight vanished right away. No longer did I see my body, the furniture in the room, the white rain slanting across the windows. No longer was I aware of where I was, the day or hour. Time and space ceased to exist.
Suddenly the entire room was filled with a great golden light, the whole world was filled with nothing but light… .
Extraordinary intuitive insights flashed across my mind. I seemed to comprehend the nature of things. I understood that the scheme of the universe was good, not evil as our Western society had taught me as a child; all people were intrinsically good. Neither time nor space existed on this plane … .
This flood of light is a common feature of mystical experiences. In one of the most famous of all books on mysticism, Richard Maurice Bucke described his own experience as he was driving home in a hansom cab:
All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-coloured cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by … the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterwards there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things … I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal… . The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone.
Bucke labelled his glimpse ‘cosmic consciousness’ and gave his book the same title. It consists of fifty studies of mystics who have experienced ‘cosmic consciousness’, beginning with the Buddha and ending with the Victorian Edward Carpenter. Bucke jumped to the conclusion that such an experience is rare — and that since there are an increasing number of modern examples, mankind is probably evolving to a higher level of awareness. In fact modern surveys — such as those taken by Sir Alister Hardy’s Religious Research Unit in Oxford* — show that an incredible 36 per cent of people have had some kind of religious or mystical experience.
Another basic element in accounts of mystical experience is the feeling that the light — or power — comes from within. Muz Murray’s account of his ‘illumination’ in Cyprus contains the phrase, ‘… an indescribable sensation as if the whole universe was being poured into me, or rather, more as if the whole universe was welling out of me from some deep centre.’ One of Nona Coxhead’s correspondents, Jim Harrison, told her how he had been wondering how God could permit his wife to remain ill when it struck him, ‘Maybe it wasn’t God’s fault after all.’
So then I thought all right, I take it all back, and filling my heart with the tender love often reserved for my little daughter, I projected it towards him, thinking, if you exist then I give you my love.
I could feel this love being passed on and on, and then suddenly it returned, a brilliant shaft of light from out of the sky, brighter by far than the mid-morning sun, permeating me with such an intensity of happiness and Love as to halt me in my tracks with a jump for joy — and lingering for five or ten seconds before fading away. I knew intuitively that this light, plainly visible, somehow, mysteriously, stemmed from within.
Jim Harrison, like so many others who have experienced a flash of ‘cosmic consciousness’, concluded:
So then I knew for certain that God does indeed exist, that he is love, that he is joy, that he is light, that he stems from within as much as from without, and that we alone are responsible for our own sufferings and problems in consequence of the mis-use of our free will.
C. G. Price, a farmer whose farm was on the point of bankruptcy, had a similar experience of light:
With thoughts of self-pity such as these in my mind, one Sunday morning in February 1968 … I set about the task of bedding my cows down with straw … I don’t even remember the feeling creeping up on me, but suddenly… .
I seemed to be enveloped in a cocoon of golden light that actually felt warm, and which radiated a feeling of Love so intense that it was almost tangible. One felt that one could grasp handfuls of it, and fill one’s pockets.
In this warm cocoon of golden light I sensed a presence which I could not actually see but knew was there. My mind became crystal clear, and in an instant of time I suddenly knew, without any doubts, that I was part of a ‘Whole’. Not an isolated part, but an integral part. I felt a sense of ‘One-ment’. I knew that I belonged and that nothing could change that. The loss of my farm and livelihood didn’t matter any more.
In fact he was forced to sell the farm, but his mystical experience made this seem unimportant.
Moyra Caldecott, a South African schoolgirl, had a similar experience when kneeling at the altar rail to take Communion. As the bishop placed his hand on her head:
I suddenly seemed to cease to be me (that is, in the sense of ‘me’ I had thought I was — living in a particular house, in a particular street, going to a particular school). I felt the most incredible flow of energy and power coursing through me and had what I believe to be an experience of Timeless Reality … of consciousness that took in everything without limit … but reacted to nothing except in the sense of ‘knowing’… and … ‘loving’.
In fact it is very tempting to say that what mystical experiences all have in common is a sudden sense of one’s real identity, and that this ‘real self’ is in some sense god-like — could even be described as God.
But perhaps the most remarkable of all accounts of mystical experience is to be found in P. D. Ouspensky’s book A New Model of the Universe, in a chapter called ‘Experimental Mysticism’. Ouspensky was the most important follower of the Russian philosopher and mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, but he was also a considerable thinker in his own right, as his books reveal. Ouspensky does not tell us the details of how he achieved his states of mystical consciousness, but his biographer James Webb is probably correct in assuming that he used yogic and magical methods combined with the use of some sort of drug, almost certainly nitrous oxide — ‘laughing gas’.* Ouspensky states that the change took place more quickly and easily than he had expected. The account that then follows is one of the most important and detailed in the whole literature of mysticism.
‘The unknown,’ Ouspensky notes, ‘is unlike anything that we can suppose about it. The complete unexpectedness of everything that is met with in these experiences, from great to small, makes the description of them difficult.’ And he goes on to make an observation of central importance:
First of all, everything is unified, everything is linked together, everything is explained by something else and in turn explains another thing. There is nothing separate, that is, nothing that can be named or described separately. In order to describe the first impressions, the first sensations, it is necessary to describe all at once. The new world with which one comes into contact has no sides, so that it is impossible to describe first one side and then the other. All of it is visible at every point … .
Here we have one of the most basic assertions that all descriptions of mystical experience have in common. Everything is seen to be connected. And the word ‘seen’ deserves to be underlined. This world of infinite relationships, in which everything is connected with everything else, is seen all at once — from a bird’s-eye view, as it were. And language instantly becomes useless, because it can only pin down one thing at a time. ‘A man becomes lost amidst the infinite number of totally new impressions, for the expression o
f which he has neither words nor forms.’
What seems equally strange is that the normal sense of the distinction between objective and subjective disappeared:
Here I saw that the objective and the subjective could change places. The one could become the other. It is very difficult to express this. The habitual mistrust of the subjective disappeared; every thought, every feeling, every image, was immediately objectified in real substantial forms which differed in no way from the forms of objective phenomena; and at the same time objective phenomena somehow disappeared, lost all reality, appeared entirely subjective, fictitious, invented, having no real existence… .
And he goes on to say that this strange world resembled more than anything else ‘a world of very complicated mathematical relations’.
This vision of infinite meaning made it very difficult to carry on a conversation, for between each word of the sentence so many ideas occurred that it was difficult to remember what he intended to say next. He began a sentence with the words, ‘I said yesterday …’ but could simply get no further. The word ‘I’ raised hundreds of insights about the meaning of ‘I’, the word ‘said’ raised just as many ideas about speech and self-expression, each of which produced ‘an explosion of thoughts, conjectures, comparisons and associations’, and the word ‘yesterday’ led to endless thoughts and ideas about the nature of time, so that he was left with a feeling of breathlessness that made it impossible to continue.
Something strange also happened to his sense of time, so that when his companion spoke, there seemed to be an immense gap between each of his words. ‘When he had finished a short sentence, the meaning of which did not reach me at all, I felt I had lived through so much during that time that we should never be able to understand one another again, that I had gone too far from him.’
All this, says Ouspensky, was accompanied by immensely powerful emotional states. ‘I took in everything through feeling, and experienced emotions which never exist in life.’ His inner world became a kaleidoscope of ‘joy, wonder, rapture, horror, continually changing one into the other’. The state seemed to allow access to infinite knowledge, but when he looked for the answer to any particular question, it ‘began far away and, gradually widening, included everything, so that finally the answer to the question included the answers to all possible questions’. He encountered the same problem when he looked at physical objects: an ashtray seemed to arouse an infinite succession of meanings and associations, so that he scrawled on a slip of paper, ‘A man can go mad from one ashtray.’ And the ashtray, like everything else, seemed to be communicating with him, almost as if it had a voice.
The remainder of Ouspensky’s description is too long and detailed to quote here even in summary (although I shall have occasion to mention specific items elsewhere in this book). His experiments usually ended in sleep, and his awakening the next morning was a dreary and disappointing experience. The ordinary world seemed unutterably dull:
… this world contained something extraordinarily oppressive: it was incredibly empty, colourless and lifeless. It was as though everything in it was wooden, as if it was an enormous wooden machine with creaking wooden wheels, wooden thoughts, wooden moods, wooden sensations; everything was terribly slow, scarcely moved, or moved with a melancholy wooden creaking. Everything was dead, soulless, feelingless.
They were terrible, these moments of awakening in an unreal world after a real one, in a dead world after a living, in a limited world, cut into small pieces, after an infinite and entire world.
In other words it is as if man found himself stranded on a planet whose gravity was so enormous that he was unable to stand upright — unable even to crawl on his hands and knees without immense effort. (Gurdjieff once said that our world is the cosmic equivalent of Outer Siberia.) In this iron world even thought is trapped by the tremendous gravity, so that it has to drag itself along the ground like a wounded animal. For the most part consciousness is little more than a mere reflection of the environment, and life is basically a mere succession of visual images, of being ‘here and now’. This is why our world seems to be ‘cut into small pieces’, why its basic characteristic is ‘separateness’. If you were utterly exhausted as you read this page it would dissolve into separate words, and even if you succeeded in grasping the meaning of an indivudal sentence the total meaning of the paragraph would still elude you. This is what our world is like. Everything stands separate and disconnected, and we have become so accustomed to this state of affairs that we assume that it is natural and inevitable. Yet it is not natural, any more than it is natural to fail to grasp the meaning of a sentence. And we realize this every time a spring morning fills us with a sense of the sheer interestingness of the world. ‘Separateness’ is unnatural; the true and natural state of affairs is a basic ‘connectedness’, just as Ouspensky realized during his mystical experiments.
In short this world, which seems to us so oppressively real, has been robbed of a dimension of reality by the feebleness of human consciousness and its inability to function efficiently in the powerful gravitational field of our universe. This is only a part of the problem. What turns a difficult situation into a dangerous one is that our mental numbness deprives us of all sense of direction, so that most human beings have given up any attempt to see things as a whole. In effect most of us waste our lives battling against the difficulties of the present moment, and when life offers us the occasional breathing space we are inclined to waste it in boredom or the search for amusement. This is why man, who is fundamentally a well-disposed and sociable creature, is capable of so much evil where his fellow creatures are concerned; the harsh Siberian environment has made him brutal and shortsighted. Yet every flash of poetic or mystical insight makes us instantly aware that such a view is, quite literally, an absurdity.
One thing seems clear: the world glimpsed in these moments of insight is more real than the world of everyday reality. And by this time it should also be quite clear that everyone who has experienced these glimpses has seen the same thing. It always involves the recognition that our usual sense of being at the mercy of circumstance, of being a slave of material reality and our own bodies, is an illusion. We possess ‘hidden powers’, tremendous reserves of unsuspected strength. One simple consequence of this insight is the power to heal sickness, in oneself and sometimes in others. The schoolgirl Moyra Caldecott described how, after her marriage, she developed angina, then had another mystical experience that left her healed. And Lawrence LeShan decided to test the validity of mystical experience by training himself to go into ‘altered states of consciousness’ through meditation, and developed the power to heal. A chapter of his book The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist is devoted to a description of some of his cases, including that of a boy who broke his back on a trampoline and was diagnosed as being permanently paralysed — until a group led by LeShan tried ‘distant healing’ and restored feeling to his legs in just about one hour.
But the main insight of all mystical experiences is obviously a sense of meaning — a feeling that the universe is not just an accidental conglomeration of matter, the chance result of some unexplainable big bang, but has the same kind of overall pattern and purpose that we can perceive in living organisms. Nobody feels that a flower or a kitten are chance occurrences, like a broken bottle; they obviously are not. And the mystic feels — or rather ‘sees’ — that the whole universe is a gigantic pattern, like some enormous flower. Mystical experiences invariably seem to instil courage and optimism.
All this enables us to see that in spite of the mystic’s insistence that they are ineffable — impossible to express in words — these experiences have a great deal in common with feelings and insights that are common to us all. Nietzsche talked about sudden feelings of overflowing vitality, ‘the glorious delight which arises in man from the very depths of nature, at the shattering of the principium individuationis … the Dionysian rapture whose closest analogy is with drunkenness.’ In Hermann Hesse’s novel Stepp
enwolf the hero (a typical self-divided ‘Outsider’) spends a night with a beautiful girl and has an overwhelming feeling of affirmation about his own life:
For moments together my heart stood still between delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how thronged the soul of the wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations… . My life had become weariness. It had wandered in a maze of unhappiness… . It was bitter with the salt of all human things; yet it had laid up riches, riches to be proud of. It had been, for all its wretchedness, a princely life. Let the little way to death be as it might — the kernel of this life of mine was noble. It came of high descent, and turned, not on trifles, but on the stars.
This is the authentic mystical insight, yet neither Steppenwolf nor his creator were mystics — merely romantics.
Mysticism can appear on still lower levels. William James even insists that the feeling we derive from alcohol (in the right circumstances) is a minor form of mystic experience. And ‘Walter’, the anonymous autobiographer of the sexual classic My Secret Life, admits that he sometimes suffers from what he calls ‘erotic madness’, in which he is so carried away by physical lust that he has no idea of what he says or does. All these experiences obviously have something in common with Bucke’s cosmic consciousness. Which inevitably raises the central question, would it be possible to build a bridge between everyday experience and the experience of the mystic, so we could cross it at any time?
In fact the scaffolding for such a bridge has already been erected by a French philosopher, Henri Bergson. Bergson was born in 1859, in the middle of the Victorian era, and soon came to share the materialism of thinkers like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. His fellow students at the Ecole Normale nicknamed him ‘the atheist’ because he insisted that the universe was a product of purely natural forces and that religion and morality were delusions of the human imagination. When his teacher reprimanded him for keeping his bookshelves untidy and asked, ‘How can your librarian’s soul stand such a mess?’ the whole class shouted in chorus, ‘Bergson has no soul.’ It was when he became a schoolmaster in the Auvergne and began taking long walks that the peace of the countryside made him aware of the poetic side of his nature. As he looked at the woods and hills his atheistic materialism dissolved away. But it was not so much a religious conversion as a philosophical one. Bergson’s great insight was that if we try to grasp reality with the mind we are bound to remain empty-handed. It passes through our fingers like a handful of water. But this does not prove that reality — or water — does not exist, or that the insights aroused in us by nature can be dismissed as ‘mere feelings’.